Comment by alfalfasprout
2 years ago
I struggle to understand what exactly people are coding up where ChatGPT actually saves them a lot of time. Is it just generic stuff that would have already been copy/pasted from stackoverflow?
I wonder how many of those people would just benefit from better auto-complete like copilot + learning how to read documentation properly.
I wanted to enhance a python script that organizes my photo library to include a fuzzy city name in the name of the folder. E.g. changing from ./2023/2023-03/2023-03-03_18-29-32.jpg to ./2023/2023-03/San_Francisco/2023-03-03_18-29-32.jpg, where the city name is pulled from the lat/long in the EXIF and then looked up online. I asked ChatGPT one "chunk" at a time, and all of the suggestions it came up with needed some probing and clarifications, but got to a working solution a lot quicker that piecing together random snippets from stack overflow (I am not a python programmer).
It translates curl calls to python requests very well. Also things like "wrap this piece of long running code and show a progress bar" and similar low level stuff.
You are right that it's absolutely possible to figure all this using google and documentation. But do you really want to spend X minutes googling for the correct python module and then figuring out ho to use it? When you can just show it your code and ask it to update it in seconds? It's like you have someone at your side who has already been there and figured out the answer for you.
IDEA's autocomplete was consistently better and more useful for me than Copilot. I think that out of the 5, maybe 10 times when it managed to autocomplete something, it was correct maybe once.
It will may be better on less idiosyncratic code base than the one I was working on, but at one point I just turned it off completely.